Hail Piled Over a Foot Deep

Follett, Texas - May 23, 2002

Video Captures of the giant hailstorm at Follett, Texas. May 23, 2002

This storm formed in the extreme northeast corner of the Texas Panhandle. It had a tornado warning on it and it did produce several spinups but the most impressive part was the hail. The storm was moving slowly, about 5 MPH, it then stalled and remained nearly stationary over the town of Follett and the hail just started to pile up.The weather radio had reports of "Giant hail to baseball sized and larger" associated with this storm. Once we got up next to the hail core we decided to turn south and get behind it. This way we could follow the storm safely as it crept east.

	The hail stones start to accumulate on the roads.			It starts to look just like wintertime back home in Toronto.
	Part of the road started to flood from the melting hail.			We came across some very astonished locals.
	One of the fields had just been planted that morning.			This was the average size of the hail stones that fell in the area.
	Some of them were quite big and these had been sitting around melting for a 1/2 hour.			The melting hail also created a few ponds in the middle of the road.
	Talking to more of the locals. We were the only chasers in the area.			Here, the runoff had created a mini set of rapids.
	Many of the hailstones were being washed away.			Most of the farmers had never seen anything like this before.
	Here's Brett taking a bite out of one of the hailstones. Not Recommended!			Mark was having fun trying to break my windshield in a "hailball' fight.
	There were even huge hail drifts out in the fields.			The air temperature dropped from about 85F to about 40F.
	Ron Gravelle braves the cold to get some footage.			This was one of the larger stones (It had already been melting for a while)
	Ron shoots some video of me driving past him.			The hail was actually scraping the bottom of Mark's car.
	This guy even needed a push to get un-stuck from the hail.

 

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